Weird Colors associated with Icon gif?

[Exile]

Ok, I subsituted a unique graphic in the icon gif (it's actually a bmp now), and it looks ok when the main initial screen comes up. But when I go to the foreign advisor/diplomacy box . . . weird color schemes are there now. Stuff I have NOT put in myself. A black background with lots of white dots, other weird colors.

Any idea what is happening and how to prevent it?

Besides replacing the boxes with the same boring gray colors in the default icon gif.

[Exile]

A clue.

Looking back through the ancient archives, I found a thread by Allard Hofelt, talking about colors and palettes and such. Here is an interesting passage;

"Below this second grid (the one you see when grid is turned on), you'll see the background of the title of almost all civ2 texts boxes and most other things. You certainly have noticed it.
There's also a second background used, the one used in the interface box on the right of the screen when playing, and also the background of all pop-up boxes. This texture is created by tiling the upperright texture (left of the Woman's Suffrage Wonder). The two other textures are not used."

Now, can someone explain to me the meaning of the word "tiling" in the 4th sentence? I keep reading this over and over, but can't quite grasp what is happening. These are the boxes that I meddled with, however. I can always simply change it back to dull gray, but would like to be able to use the graphic I created--but only if it won't screw up the background in the pop-up boxes.

[Jacobite1688]

I've seen this before, but have no idea how to prevent it. I too will be intrested in an answer to this.

[Exile]

Once again . . .

Problem solved. After much experimentation (and some lucky guesswork ), I've come up with a good solution to this problem. Part of it involves changing the data in the image to "optimized 256 color," whatever that means. Once I did that, the images I selected, after being shrunk, were recognizable and didn't disrupt the other colors elsewhere.

Now I've got another problem. I've created 3 different "border" images, they're all good, and I can't decide which one to use.

Here's the first;

[Exile]

Here's the 2nd;

Ooops. Never mind--I'll just ask the playtesters.

[Stefan Härtel]

In that sense...

...does anybody know if it is possible to change the text color of the pop-up boxes?

[hardjoy]

Re: Weird Colors associated with Icon gif?

Originally posted by Exile
Ok, I subsituted a unique graphic in the icon gif (it's actually a bmp now), and it looks ok when the main initial screen comes up. But when I go to the foreign advisor/diplomacy box . . . weird color schemes are there now. Stuff I have NOT put in myself. A black background with lots of white dots, other weird colors.

Any idea what is happening and how to prevent it?

Besides replacing the boxes with the same boring gray colors in the default icon gif.

Don't know if this is what you're asking about, but here goes anyway.

When you import any graphic into the civ2 image files, it is a good idea to first convert the image to truecolor i.e. the largest available color palette, then rescale and do adjustments, if it doesn't come out right.

Then load in the (previously saved) civ2 palette of the file you wish to paste it into. Then you can cut'n paste the image without any color divergence.

Note, however, that a number of colors in the end of the civ2 palette is reserved for special purposes, so if your image uses these, they should be manually replaced with similar colours from another place in the palette.

BTW, "tiling" simply means that civ2 'tiles' the background icons, i.e. they are repeated continuously to fill a large background, like when used behind text messages.

[Exile]

Some answers.

Stephan; the post by Allard also said some things about changing the text color, but, IIRC, it said that it can't be done or can't be done easily.

Hardjoy; Yeah, when I reread the stuff I did last night this morning, it hit me what "tiling" meant. DOH! But, all I know about graphics is that my method (whatever it is) works, for now. So I'll stick with it. But thanks for the assistance.

[Cam]

You might find this item on the old Scenario League Design Tips site of interest re. text colour. I was able to change the text, but had difficulty regarding changing the colour scheme of the radar buttons or submit buttons. Allard was confident that these could be changed too, but I don't recall if there was any further discoveries on this question.

[Exile]

Thanks, Cam.

It was informative, but the one thing he failed to touch on was the rectangle in Icons.gif that I played with.

He is much more methodical than me, however.

I just toyed with it until discovering something that worked. Then stuck with that method.

Also, I replaced all the squares in Icons.gif, just to see what would happen. None of the buttons you mentioned changed. I have yet to figure out how to do that myself.

[Mercator]

I don't know about the rest, but the radio buttons and checkboxes definitely can't be changed! These graphics are located inside the civ2 executable itself... To put it differently, they can be changed (quite easily even), but you have to edit the Civ2.exe for that.

[Allard HS]

Now, can someone explain to me the meaning of the word "tiling" in the 4th sentence?

Tiling? One of the words I invented, I guess. I mean to say that the square is put next to the same square, making one big area with the same little squares. Kind of like the desktop of Windows, where you can select to "tile" your picture so that they are displayed next to and above and under themselves.

To preview squares to check if there's no ugly border between the squares and at least dither it, there's an excellent program called Harmwave (I believe it's called sTile now), which you can download here:

http://www.users.qwest.net/~sharman1/

...does anybody know if it is possible to change the text color of the pop-up boxes?

Very easy; just edit the palette. Which ones to edit is all explained in my sleague design tip on palettes. Only the UNITS.GIF palette is important, the other palettes don't matter.

had difficulty regarding changing the colour scheme of the radar buttons or submit buttons. Allard was confident that these could be changed too, but I don't recall if there was any further discoveries on this question.

Of course, without confidence, there's no point in doing anything.
Well, it is actually very much possible. The radio buttons and check buttons, as well as some other things are stored in the Civ.exe file. You need a resource editor to edit them. There are lots of them, but I recently discovered Exescope, which can also change file sizes and 16bit programs (like CivNet, CivWin). Download it here:

http://www.vector.co.jp/authors/VA003525/

You can also use this program to edit the dll's of the game. This program is actually much better than GifX, because it also allows the file sizes to be changed, which makes it a lot easier, cause you don't have to stay under a limited file size anymore.

The graphics we were talking about (radio and check buttons) are easy to change to anything you like, but hard to distribute with your scenario, as there are a lot of different versions of civ.exe around and you don't want to mess people's files up.